Reading up on Elite Dangerous has made me frisky. I have always had a tender spot for space-games, ever since I played Tie-Fighter way back in the days when they were plentiful (I still actually have the disk somewhere), I have bounced from each popular joystick-jaunt to another during my teens. I even played the original Elite on our schools old Acorn during my lunch breaks, and never quite getting the hang of it to be truthful. The notion of trading was a strange concept to my Command & Conquer addled mind, and I instead spent my efforts on trying to blow stuff up.

I still enjoy space-sims, despite the pickings being very slim over the past few years. The X: Beyond the Frontier games have kept the wolves from the door for the most part, but I have began to notice something missing from the experience.

The ships you fly in almost all modern space-sims are all terribly dull.

Old news alert! I wrote this a while back and promptly forgot about it. Imagine you are reading this just after the announcement for maximum interest. Ta!

The Elder Scrolls Online is climbing the gears as it’s beta rolls on, and I am still sitting here waiting on an invite. I’m not bitter or anything, but Bethesda are really starting to fray my washcloth. Much has been said about this attempt to bring multiplayer to the lands formerly stalked by a single dragonborn/chosen one, and as I can’t validate any of it, all I can do to feel involved is sit here with my pen and my checklist of ways Bethesda could screw TESO up, and play bingo.

They announced TESO would be using monthly subs, which means I can score out “Free 2 Play” from my list, thank goodness. That would have been a massive mistake. « Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a strange setup for me to be honest, and I wasn’t expecting much. The original Bioshock was a game that I really struggled to like. The setting was amazing, and the sheer level of detail contained within the damp, dripping halls of Rapture was enough to send the literary munchkin in my head into spasms of glee. And yet, the actual game left me feeling blunted and somewhat miserable.

Would you kindly stop shooting/screaming at me for a moment? I’m trying to listen to this recording…

Well, it’s been almost five months since I last ranted incoherently on these not-so-hallowed pages, and in that time I’ve moved house. Twice. I also went a whole three months with no net – thanks, Sky Broadband! I also somehow managed to find myself living with some woman who claims to love me… it’s all a little strange and new. But she buys me cakes, so I think I love her too.

Of course, my writing (and gaming, and… er, other things) has been adversely effected by all this moving and rampant emotional upheaval, and for that I am truly sorry.

But, I’m back. And once again, words are fighting each other in my head, before spilling out on to… you know what? Screw the flowery nonsense. Here’s some of the stuff I wrote during my “break”.

It’s probably something to do with my unhealthy fascination with Star Trek during my childhood, the prospect of captaining a fully-functioning star-ship always reduces me to a dribbling wreck of a geek. Artemis was a thing in my house a while back, until my increasingly garbled orders and over-stimulated monologues eventually started to disturb/scare my younger brothers.

It’s a strange thing; the less you actually do, the faster time seems to fly in. I turned 29 last month, and am currently preparing myself for the big three-oh next year. It’s been almost a decade since I turned twenty, and god – it feels like about a month.

It has been announced recently that Final Fantasy 7 is to be re-released, and (shock) is PC bound. Of course, this has already been foretold – ever since the PS3 tech-demo featuring Aeris was shown to gob-smacked crowds at some presentation or something (I’m not big on the PS3), there has been a deep murmur in certain parts of the web that a remake may be in the works.